Busy Little Bees — Their Own Page, *Omaha Sunday Bee*, December 12, 1909

Not the dream-palace architecture of *Little Nemo* but its workaday neighbor: Busy Little Bees — Their Own Page is a children's submission column occupying a full broadsheet Sunday page, dense with reader letters, short prose stories, verse, and a central multi-panel illustrated serial titled *Little Stories by Little Folks*. Spot illustrations show children in winter scenes; rules-of-conduct panels address young writers directly. No single strip artist is credited. The page represents the Sunday newspaper as a laboratory — before the comic book existed as an object, the syndicated Sunday supplement *was* the mass-circulation picture publication, training both readers and editors in sequenced images, recurring characters, and the visual conventions that Outcault, McCay, and Dirks had been formalizing since the 1890s.